Governança Policêntrica de Sistemas Econômicos Complexos - Elinor Ostrom

408 Beyond Markets and states Polycentric Governance of coMPlex econoMic systeMs Prize lecture december 8 2009 by Elinor ostrom Workshop in Political theory and Policy analysis indiana University Bloomington in 47408 and center for the study of institutional diversity arizona state University tempe aZ Usa contemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institutional arrange ments for governing commonpool resources cPrs and public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of the market and the state scholars are slowly shifting from positing simple systems to using more complex frameworks theories and models to un derstand the diversity of puzzles and problems facing humans interacting in contemporary societies the humans we study have complex motivational structures and establish diverse privateforprofit governmental and community institutional arrangements that operate at multiple scales to generate productive and innovative as well as destructive and perverse outcomes north 1990 2005 in this article i will describe the intellectual journey that i have taken the last half century from when i began graduate studies in the late 1950s the early efforts to understand the polycentric water industry in california were formative for me in addition to working with vincent ostrom and charles tiebout as they formulated the concept of polycentric systems for governing metropolitan areas i studied the efforts of a large group of private and public water producers facing the problem of an overdrafted groundwater basin on the coast and watching saltwater intrusion threaten the possibility of longterm use then in the 1970s i participated with colleagues in the study of polycentric police industries serving Us metropolitan areas to find that the dominant theory underlying massive reform proposals was incorrect Metropolitan areas served by a combination of large and small producers could achieve economies of scale in the production of some police services and avoid diseconomies of scale in the production of others these early empirical studies led over time to the development of the institutional analysis and development iad framework a common framework consistent with game theory enabled us to undertake a variety of empirical studies including a metaanalysis of a large number of existing 409 case studies on commonpool resource systems around the world carefully designed experimental studies in the lab have enabled us to test precise combinations of structural variables to find that isolated anonymous indi viduals overharvest from commonpool resources simply allowing commu nication or cheap talk enables participants to reduce overharvesting and increase joint payoffs contrary to gametheoretical predictions large studies of irrigation systems in nepal and forests around the world challenge the presumption that governments always do a better job than users in organizing and protecting important resources currently many scholars are undertaking new theoretical efforts a core ef fort is developing a more general theory of individual choice that recognizes the central role of trust in coping with social dilemmas over time a clear set of findings from the microsituational level has emerged regarding structural factors affecting the likelihood of increased cooperation due to the complexity of broader field settings one needs to develop more configural approaches to the study of factors that enhance or detract from the emergence and robustness of selforganized efforts within multilevel polycentric systems further the application of empirical studies to the policy world leads one to stress the importance of fitting institutional rules to a specific socialecological setting onesizefitsall policies are not effective 1 the earlier World vieW of siMPle systeMs in the midtwentieth century the dominant scholarly effort was to try to fit the world into simple models and to criticize institutional arrangements that did not fit i will briefly review the basic assumptions that were made at that time but have been challenged by scholars around the world including the work of herbert simon 1955 and vincent ostrom 2008 A Two Optimal Organizational Forms the market was seen as the optimal institution for the production and exchange of private goods for nonprivate goods on the other hand one needed the government to impose rules and taxes to force selfinterested individuals to contribute necessary resources and refrain from selfseeking activities Without a hierarchical government to induce compliance self seeking citizens and officials would fail to generate efficient levels of public goods such as peace and security at multiple scales hobbes 1651 1960 W Wilson 1885 a single governmental unit for example was strongly recommended to reduce the chaotic structure of metropolitan governance increase efficiency limit conflict among governmental units and best serve a homogeneous view of the public anderson and Weidner 1950 Gulick 1957 friesema 1966 this dichotomous view of the world explained patterns of interaction and outcomes related to markets for the production and exchange of strictly private goods alchian 1950 but it has not adequately accounted for internal dynamics within private firms Williamson 1975 1986 nor does it adequately deal with the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that 410 humans craft to govern provide and manage public goods and common pool resources B Two Types of Goods in his classic definitional essay Paul samuelson 1954 divided goods into two types Pure private goods are both excludable individual a can be excluded from consuming private goods unless paid for and rivalrous whatever individual a consumes no one else can consume Public goods are both nonexcludable impossible to keep those who have not paid for a good from consuming it and nonrivalrous whatever individual a consumes does not limit the consumption by others this basic division was consistent with the dichotomy of the institutional world into private property exchanges in a market setting and governmentowned property organized by a public hierarchy the people of the world were viewed primarily as consumers or voters C One Model of the Individual the assumption that all individuals are fully rational was generally accepted in mainstream economics and game theory fully rational individuals are presumed to know 1 all possible strategies available in a particular situation 2 which outcomes are linked to each strategy given the likely behavior of others in a situation and 3 a rank order for each of these outcomes in terms of the individuals own preferences as measured by utility the rational strategy for such an individual in every situation is to maximize expected utility While utility was originally conceived of as a way of combining a diver sity of external values on a single internal scale in practice it has come to be equated with one externalized unit of measure such as expected profits this model of the individual has fruitfully generated useful and empirically validated predictions about the results of exchange transactions related to goods with specific attributes in a competitive market but not in a diversity of social dilemmas i will return to a discussion of the theory of individual behavior in section 7a 2 early efforts to develoP a fUller UnderstandinG of coMPlex hUMan systeMs the midtwentiethcentury world views of simple systems have slowly been transformed as a result of extensive empirical research and the development of a framework consistent with gametheoretical models for the analysis of a broad array of questions A Studying Polycentric Public Industries Undertaking empirical studies of how citizens local public entrepreneurs and public officials engage in diverse ways of providing producing and managing public service industries and commonproperty regimes at multiple scales has generated substantial knowledge that is not explained 411 by two models of optimal organizational forms vincent ostrom charles tiebout and robert Warren 1961 introduced the concept of polycentricity in their effort to understand whether the activities of a diverse array of public and private agencies engaged in providing and producing of public services in metropolitan areas was chaotic as charged by other scholars or potentially a productive arrangement Polycentric connotes many centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other Whether they actually function independently or instead constitute an interdependent system of relations is an empirical question in particular cases to the extent that they take each other into account in competitive relationships enter into various contractual and cooperative undertakings or have recourse to central mechanisms to resolve conflicts the various political jurisdictions in a metropolitan area may function in a coherent manner with consistent and predictable patterns of interacting behavior to the extent that this is so they may be said to function as a system v ostrom tiebout and Warren 1961 83132 drawing on the concept of a public service industry Bain 1959 caves 1964 v ostrom and e ostrom 1965 several studies of water industry performance were carried out in diverse regions of california during the 1960s v ostrom 1962 Weschler 1968 Warren 1966 e ostrom 1965 substantial evidence was found that multiple public and private agencies had searched out productive ways of organizing water resources at multiple scales contrary to the view that the presence of multiple governmental units without a clear hierarchy was chaotic further evidence pointed out three mechanisms that increase productivity in polycentric metropolitan areas 1 small to mediumsized cities are more effective than large cities in monitor ing performance of their citizens and relevant costs 2 citizens who are dissatisfied with service provision can vote with their feet and move to jurisdictions that come closer to their preferred mix and costs of public services and 3 local incorporated communities can contract with larger producers and change contracts if not satisfied with the services provided while neighborhoods inside a large city have no voice in the 1970s the earlier work on effects of diverse ways of organizing the provision of water in metropolitan areas was extended to policing and public safety We found that while many police departments served 80 metropolitan areas that we studied duplication of services by more than one department to the same set of citizens rarely occurred e ostrom Parks and Whitaker 1978 further the widely held belief that a multiplicity of departments in a metropolitan area was less efficient was not found in fact the most efficient producers supply more output for given inputs in high multiplicity metropolitan areas than do the efficient producers in metropolitan areas with fewer producers e ostrom and Parks 1999 287 Metropolitan areas with large numbers of autonomous direct service producers achieved higher 412 levels of technical efficiency ibid 290 technical efficiency was also en hanced in those metropolitan areas with a small number of producers pro viding indirect services such as radio communication and criminal laboratory analyses We were able to reject the theory underlying the proposals of the metropolitan reform approach We demonstrated that complexity is not the same as chaos in regard to metropolitan governance that lesson has carried forth as we have undertaken further empirical studies of polycentric gover nance of resource and infrastructure systems across the world andersson and ostrom 2008 e ostrom schroeder and Wynne 1993 B Doubling the Types of Goods studying how individuals cope with diverse public problems in the world led us to reject samuelsons twofold classification of goods Buchanan 1965 had already added a third type of good which he called club goods in relation to these kinds of goods it was feasible for groups of individuals to create private associations clubs to provide themselves nonrivalrous but smallscale goods and services that they could enjoy while excluding nonmembers from participation and consumption of benefits in light of further empirical and theoretical research we proposed additional modifications to the classification of goods to identify fundamental differences that affect the incentives facing individuals v ostrom and e ostrom 1977 1 replacing the term rivalry of consumption with subtractability of use 2 conceptualizing subtractability of use and excludability to vary from low to high rather than characterizing them as either present or ab sent 3 overtly adding a very important fourth type of good commonpool resources that shares the attribute of subtractability with private goods and difficulty of exclusion with public goods v ostrom and e ostrom 1977 forests water systems fisheries and the global atmos phere are all commonpool resources of immense importance for the survival of humans on this earth 4 changing the name of a club good to a toll good since many goods that share these characteristics are provided by smallscale public as well as private associations figure 1 provides an overview of four broad types of goods that differenti ally affect the problems individuals face in devising institutions to enable them to provide produce and consume diverse goods these four broad types of goods contain many subtypes of goods that vary substantially in regard to many attributes for example a river and a forest are both common pool resources they differ substantially however in regard to the mobility of the resource units produced the ease of measurement the time scale for regeneration and other attributes specific commonpool resources also differ in regard to spatial extent number of users and many other factors 413 subtractability of Use high low difficulty of excluding Potential Beneficiaries high commonpool resources groundwater basins lakes irrigation systems fisheries forests etc Public goods peace and security of a community national defense knowledge fire protection weather forecasts etc low Private goods food clothing automobiles etc toll goods theaters private clubs daycare centers Figure 1 four types of goods source adapted from e ostrom 2005 24 When one engages in substantial fieldwork one confronts an immense diversity of situations in which humans interact riding as an observer in a patrol car in the central district of a large american city at midnight on a saturday evening one sees different patterns of human interaction than in a suburb on a weekday afternoon when school is letting out in both cases one observes the production of a public good local safety by an official of a local government others who are involved in each situation differ in regard to age sobriety why they are there and what they are trying to accomplish and this context affects the strategies of the police officer one is observing contrast observing the production of a public good to watching private water companies city utilities private oil companies and local citizens meeting in diverse settings to assess who is to blame for overdrafting their groundwater basin causing massive saltwater intrusion and what to do next these individuals all face the same problem the overdraft of a common pool resource but their behavior differs substantially when they meet monthly in a private water association when they face each other in a court room and when they go to the legislature and eventually to the citizens to sponsor a special replenishment district these and many other situations observed in irrigation systems and forests in multiple countries do not closely resemble the standard models of a market or a hierarchy 3 develoPinG a fraMeWork for analyZinG the diversity of hUMan sitUations the complexity and diversity of the field settings we have studied has generat ed an extended effort by colleagues associated with the Workshop in Political theory and Policy analysis the Workshop to develop the iad framework v ostrom 1975 kiser and ostrom 1982 McGinnis 1999a b 2000 e ostrom 1986 2005 the framework contains a nested set of building blocks that social scientists can use in efforts to understand human interactions and out comes across diverse settings the iad builds on earlier work on transactions commons 1924 1968 logic of the situation Popper 1961 collective struc tures allport 1962 frames Goffman 1974 and scripts schank and abelson 1977 the approach also draws inspiration from the work of koestler 1973 and simon 1981 1995 who both challenged the assumption 414 that human behavior and outcomes are entirely based on a small set of irreducible building blocks While the terms frameworks theories and models are used interchange ably by many scholars we use these concepts in a nested manner to range from the most general to the most precise set of assumptions made by a scholar the iad framework is intended to contain the most general set of variables that an institutional analyst may want to use to examine a diver sity of institutional settings including human interactions within markets private firms families community organizations legislatures and government agencies it provides a metatheoretical language to enable scholars to discuss any particular theory or to compare theories a specific theory is used by an analyst to specify which working parts of a framework are considered useful to explain diverse outcomes and how they relate to one another Microlevel theories including game theory micro economic theory transaction cost theory and public goodscommonpool resource theories are examples of specific theories compatible with the iad framework Models make precise assumptions about a limited number of variables in a theory that scholars use to examine the formal consequences of these specific assumptions about the motivation of actors and the structure of the situation they face the iad framework is designed to enable scholars to analyze systems that are composed of a cluster of variables each of which can then be unpacked multiple times depending on the question of immediate interest at the core of the iad framework is the concept of an action situation affected by external variables see figure 2 the broadest categories of external factors affecting an action situation at a particular time include 1 Biophysical conditions which may be simplified in some analyses to be one of the four types of goods defined in figure 1 2 attributes of a community which may include the history of prior interactions internal homogeneity or heterogeneity of key attributes and the knowledge and social capital of those who may participate or be affected by others 3 rulesinuse which specify common understanding of those involved related to who must must not or may take which actions affecting others subject to sanctions crawford and ostrom 2005 the rulesinuse may evolve over time as those involved in one action situation interact with others in a variety of settings e ostrom 2008 e ostrom and Basurto forthcoming Boyd and richerson 1985 or selfconsciously change the rules in a collectivechoice or constitutionalchoice setting the set of external variables impacts an action situation to generate patterns of interactions and outcomes that are evaluated by participants in the action situation and potentially by scholars and feed back on both the external variables and the action situation 415 Figure 2 a framework for institutional analysis source adapted from e ostrom 2005 15 the internal working parts of an action situation are overtly consistent with the variables that a theorist uses to analyze a formal game1 this has meant that colleagues have been able to use formal game theory models consistent with the iad framework to analyze simplified but interesting combinations of theoretical variables and derive testable conclusions from them see acheson and Gardner 2005 Gardner et al 2000 Weissing and ostrom 1993 as well as agentbased models aBMs Jager and Janssen 2002 Janssen 2008 it is not feasible to develop a formal game or even an aBM to analyze the more complex empirical settings with many variables of relevance affecting outcomes and of importance for institutional analysis it is possible however to use a common set of structural elements to develop structured coding forms for data collection and analysis and one can design experiments using a common set of variables for many situations of interest to political economists and then examine why particular behavior and outcomes occur in some situations and not in others to specify the structure of a game and predict outcomes the theorist needs to posit the 1 characteristics of the actors involved including the model of human choice adopted by the theorist 2 positions they hold eg first mover or row player 3 set of actions that actors can take at specific nodes in a decision tree 4 amount of information available at a decision node 5 outcomes that actors jointly affect 6 set of functions that map actors and actions at decision nodes into intermediate or final outcomes and 7 benefits and costs assigned to the linkage of actions chosen and out comes obtained 1 i am much appreciative of the many hours of productive discussions that i had with reinhard selten in the early 1980s as we started to develop the iad framework about the internal working parts of a formal game that could be used in the framework External Variables Interactions Outcomes Evaluative Criteria Biophysical Conditions Attributes of Community RulesinUse Action Situations Figure 2 A framework for institutional analysis Source Adapted from E Ostrom 2005 15 416 these are also the internal working parts of an action situation as shown in figure 3 as discussed below using a common framework across a wide diversity of studies has enabled a greater cumulation of understanding of interactions and outcomes in very complex environments the iad frame work overtly embeds a particular situation of interest in a broader setting of external variables some of which can be selfconsciously revised over time figure 3 the internal structure of an action situation source adapted from e ostrom 2005 33 4 are rational individUals helPlessly traPPed in social dileMMas the classic assumptions about rational individuals facing a dichotomy of or ganizational forms and of goods hide the potentially productive efforts of in dividuals and groups to organize and solve social dilemmas such as the over harvesting of commonpool resources and the underprovision of local public goods the classic models have been used to view those who are involved in a Prisoners dilemma game or other social dilemmas as always trapped in the situation without capabilities to change the structure themselves this ana lytical step was a retrogressive step in the theories used to analyze the human condition Whether or not the individuals who are in a situation have capaci ties to transform the external variables affecting their own situation varies dramatically from one situation to the next it is an empirical condition that varies from situation to situation rather than a logical universality Public in vestigators purposely keep prisoners separated so they cannot communicate the users of a commonpool resource are not so limited When analysts perceive the human beings they model as being trapped inside perverse situations they then assume that other human beings ex ternal to those involved scholars and public officials are able to analyze 417 the situation ascertain why counterproductive outcomes are reached and posit what changes in the rulesinuse will enable participants to improve out comes then external officials are expected to impose an optimal set of rules on those individuals involved it is assumed that the momentum for change must come from outside the situation rather than from the selfreflection and creativity of those within a situation to restructure their own patterns of interaction as sugden has described this approach Most modern economic theory describes a world presided over by a government not significantly by governments and sees this world through the governments eyes the government is supposed to have the responsibility the will and the power to restructure society in whatever way maximizes social welfare like the Us cavalry in a good Western the government stands ready to rush to the rescue whenever the market fails and the economists job is to advise it on when and how to do so Private individuals in contrast are credited with little or no ability to solve collective problems among themselves this makes for a distorted view of some important economic and political issues sugden 1986 3 emphasis in original Garrett hardins 1968 portrayal of the users of a commonpool resource a pasture open to all being trapped in an inexorable tragedy of overuse and destruction has been widely accepted since it was consistent with the pre diction of no cooperation in a Prisoners dilemma or other social dilemma games it captured the attention of scholars and policymakers across the world Many presumed that all commonpool resources were owned by no one thus it was thought that government officials had to impose new exter nal variables eg new policies to prevent destruction by users who could not do anything other than destroy the resources on which their own future as well as the rest of our futures depended A Scholars from Diverse Disciplines Examine Whether Resource Users are Always Trapped dramatic incidents of overharvested resources had captured widespread at tention while studies by anthropologists economic historians engineers historians philosophers and political scientists of local governance of small to mediumscale commonpool resources over long periods of time were not noticed by many theorists and public officials see netting 1972 Mccay and acheson 1987 coward 1980 cumulation of the knowledge contained in these studies did not occur due to the fact that the studies were written by scholars in diverse disciplines focusing on different types of resources located in many countries fortunately the national research council nrc established a commit tee in the mid1980s to assess diverse institutional arrangements for effective conservation and utilization of jointly managed resources the nrc com mittee brought scholars from multiple disciplines together and used the 418 iad framework in an effort to begin to identify common variables in cases where users had organized or failed to organize oakerson 1986 nrc 1986 finding multiple cases where resource users were successful in organizing themselves challenged the presumption that it was impossible for resource users to solve their own problems of overuse the nrc report opened up the possibility of a diversity of studies using multiple methods the nrc effort also stimulated an extended research program at the Workshop that involved coding and analyzing case studies of commonpool resources written by other scholars B MetaAnalyses of CommonPool Resource Cases in an effort to learn more than just the existence of multiple cases where resource users had selforganized colleagues at the Workshop undertook a metaanalysis of existing case studies that were identified as a result of the activities of the nrc panel2 Because of our prior studies of complex urban systems and the development of a framework and common language for link ing the parts of complex systems we could use the framework to help orga nize our efforts the iad framework became the foundation for designing a coding manual that was used to record a consistent set of variables for each commonpool resource study this was an immense effort More than two years was devoted to develop ing the final coding manual e ostrom et al 1989 a key problem was the minimal overlap of variables identified by case study authors from diverse dis ciplines the team had to read and screen over 500 case studies in order to identify a small set of cases that recorded information about the actors their strategies the condition of the resource and the rulesinuse3 a common set of variables was recorded for 44 subgroups of fishers who harvested from inshore fisheries schlager 1990 1994 and 47 irrigation systems that were managed either by farmers or by a government tang 1992 1994 of the 47 irrigation systems included in the analysis 12 were managed by governmental agencies of which only 40 percent n 7 had high perfor mance of the 25 farmermanaged over 70 percent n 18 had high perfor mance tang 1994 234 rule conformance was a key variable affecting the adequacy of water over time ibid 229 none of the inshore fishery groups analyzed by schlager were governmentmanaged and 11 25 percent were not organized in any way the other 33 subgroups had a diversity of informal rules to define who was allowed to fish in a particular location and how har vesting was restricted schlager 1994 260 2 this metaanalysis effort is described in chapter 4 of Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 3 scholars across disciplines tend to use very different vocabularies and theoretical frameworks when they describe empirical settings other scholars who have used metaanalysis have also needed to screen many publications to obtain consistent data about human used resource systems Pagdee kim and daugherty 2006 report screening over 100 articles in order to analyze 31 cases related to forest management rudel 2008 reported that he had screened nearly 1200 studies for a metaanalysis of 268 cases of tropical forest cover change 419 in addition to finding significant levels of cooperation we found some support for earlier theoretical predictions of no cooperation in particular settings in cPr dilemmas where individuals do not know one another cannot communicate effectively and thus cannot develop agreements norms and sanctions aggregate predictions derived from models of rational individuals in a noncooperative game receive substantial support these are sparse environments and full rationality appears to be a reasonable assumption in them e ostrom Gardner and Walker 1994 319 on the other hand the capacity to overcome dilemmas and create effec tive governance occurred far more frequently than expected and depended upon the structure of the resource itself and whether the rulesinuse develo ped by users were linked effectively to this structure Blomquist et al 1994 in all selforganized systems we found that users had created boundary rules for determining who could use the resource choice rules related to the al location of the flow of resource units and active forms of monitoring and local sanctioning of rule breakers ibid 301 on the other hand we did not find a single case where harvesters used the grim trigger strategy a form of punishment that was posited in many theoretical arguments for how indi viduals could solve repeated dilemmas dutta 1990 264 C The Bundles of Property Rights Related to CommonPool Resources resource economists have used the term common property resource to refer to fisheries and water resources Gordon 1954 scott 1955 Bell 1972 combining the term property with resource introduced considerable confusion between the nature of a good and the absence or presence of a property regime ciriacyWantrup and Bishop 1975 a commonpool resource can be owned and managed as government property private prop erty community property or owned by no one Bromley 1986 a further reason for the lack of awareness about property systems developed by local users was that many scholars presumed that unless users possessed alienation rights the right to sell their property they did not have any property rights alchian and demsetz 1973 anderson and hill 1990 Posner 1975 schlager and ostrom 1992 drew on the earlier work of John r commons 1924 1968 to conceptualize propertyrights systems as containing bundles of rights rather than a single right the metaanalysis of existing field cases helped to identify five property rights that individuals using a commonpool resource might cumulatively have 1 access the right to enter a specified property4 2 Withdrawal the right to harvest specific products from a re source 3 Management the right to transform the resource and regulate 4 the concept of access rights has puzzled some scholars an everyday example of an access right is the buying of a permit to enter a public park this assigns the holder of a permit the right to enter and enjoy hiking and other nonharvesting activities for a defined period of time 420 internal use patterns 4 exclusion the right to decide who will have access withdrawal or management rights and 5 alienation the right to lease or sell any of the other four rights conceiving of propertyrights bundles is now widely accepted by scholars who have studied diverse propertyrights systems around the world Brunckhorst 2000 degnbol and Mccay 2007 Paavola and adger 2005 trawick 2001 J Wilson et al 1994 D Linking the Internal Parts of an Action Situation to External Rules actors who have specific property rights to a resource also face more fun damental rules that affect the structure of the action situations they are in in our metaanalysis we found an incredible array of specific rules used in different settings eg who could withdraw how many resource units at what location and time what information was required of all users what costs and benefits were attached to which actions etc as we attempted to find a consistent way of coding and analyzing this rich diversity of specific rules de scribed by case authors we turned again to the iad framework since we had identified seven working parts of a game or action situation itself it seemed reasonable to think of seven broad types of rules operating as external vari ables affecting the individual working parts of action situations see figure 4 the seven types of rules are 1 Boundary rules that specify how actors were to be chosen to enter or leave these positions 2 Position rules that specify a set of positions and how many actors hold each one 3 choice rules that specify which actions are assigned to an actor in a position 4 information rules that specify channels of communication among actors and what information must may or must not be shared 5 scope rules that specify the outcomes that could be affected 6 aggregation rules such as majority or unanimity rules that specify how the decisions of actors at a node were to be mapped to intermediate or final outcomes and 7 Payoff rules that specify how benefits and costs were to be distributed to actors in positions crawford and ostrom 2005 421 a useful way of thinking about institutional rules is to conceptualize what part of an action situation is affected by a rule see figure 4 conceptualizing seven broad types of rules rather than one or two has been upsetting to scholars who wanted to rely on simple models of interac tions among humans in addition to finding seven broad types of rules how ever we also found multiple variants of each type for example we found 27 boundary rules described by case study authors as used in at least one commonpool resource setting e ostrom 1999 510 some rules specified diverse forms of residence organizational memberships or personal attri butes that are ascribed or acquired similarly we found 112 different choice rules that were usually composed of two parts an allocation formula specify ing where when or how resource units could be harvested and a specific ba sis for the implementation of the formula such as the amount of land held historical use patterns or assignment through lottery ibid 512 E LongSurviving Resource Institutions after working for several years with colleagues to code cases of successful and failed systems i thought my next task would be to undertake careful statistical analysis to identify which specific rules were associated with suc cessful systems i had not yet fully absorbed the incredible number and diversity of rules that the team had recorded in 1988 i spent a sabbatical leave in a research group organized by reinhard selten at the center for interdisciplinary research at Bielefeld University i struggled to find rules that worked across ecological social and economic environments but the specific rules associated with success or failure varied extensively across sites finally i had to give up the idea that specific rules might be associated with successful cases Figure 4 rules as exogenous variables directly affecting the elements of an action situation source adapted from e ostrom 2005 189 422 Moving up a level in generality i tried to understand the broader insti tutional regularities among the systems that were sustained over a long pe riod of time and were absent in the failed systems i used the term design principle to characterize these regularities i did not mean that the fishers irrigators pastoralists and others overtly had these principles in their minds when they developed systems that survived for long periods of time My effort was to identify a set of core underlying lessons that characterized the long sustained regimes as contrasted to the cases of failure e ostrom 19905 since the design principles are described extensively in e ostrom 1990 2005 i will list only a brief updated list as developed by cox arnold and villamayortomás 2009 1a User Boundaries clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and nonusers are present 1B resource Boundaries clear boundaries that separate a specific common pool resource from a larger socialecological system are present 2a congruence with local conditions appropriation and provision rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions 2B appropriation and Provision appropriation rules are congruent with provision rules the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits 3 collectivechoice arrangements Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules 4a Monitoring Users individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the appropriation and provision levels of the users 4B Monitoring the resource individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the condition of the resource 5 Graduated sanctions sanctions for rule violations start very low but become stronger if a user repeatedly violates a rule 6 conflictresolution Mechanisms rapid lowcost local arenas exist for resolving conflicts among users or with officials 7 Minimal recognition of rights the rights of local users to make their own rules are recognized by the government 8 nested enterprises When a commonpool resource is closely connected to a larger socialecological system governance activities are organized in multiple nested layers the design principles appear to synthesize core factors that affect the prob ability of longterm survival of an institution developed by the users of a re source cox arnold and villamayortomás 2009 analyzed over 100 studies by scholars who assessed the relevance of the principles as an explanation of the success or failure of diverse commonpool resources twothirds of these 5 the term design principle has confused many readers Perhaps i should have used the term best practices to describe the rules and structure of robust institutions 423 studies confirm that robust resource systems are characterized by most of the design principles and that failures are not the authors of some studies that found the design principles inadequate tended to interpret them very rigidly and felt that successful systems were characterized by more flexibility in three instances the initial wording of the design principles was too gen eral and did not distinguish between ecological and social conditions thus i have adopted the improvements to principles 1 2 and 4 suggested by cox and coauthors 5 condUctinG exPeriMents to stUdy coMMonPool resoUrce ProBleMs the existence of a large number of cases where users had overcome social dilemmas in order to sustain longterm use of commonpool resources suc cessfully challenged the presumption that this was impossible Many variables simultaneously affect these outcomes in the field developing gametheoreti cal models of commonpool resource situations Weissing and ostrom 1993 e ostrom and Gardner 1993 has been one strategy we have used to assess the theoretical outcomes of a set of variables we have observed in the field We have also thought it was important to examine the effect of precise com binations of variables in an experimental setting A CommonPool Resource Experiments in University Laboratories roy Gardner and James Walker joined me in an extended effort to build and test wellspecified gametheoretical models consistent with the iad frame work see e ostrom Walker and Gardner 1992 e ostrom Gardner and Walker 1994 the initial cPr experiments started with a static baseline situ ation that was as simple as could be specified without losing crucial aspects of the appropriation problems facing harvesters in the field We used a qua dratic payoff production function based on Gordons 1954 classic model the initial resource endowment ω for each of eight subjects was a set of tokens that the subject could allocate between Market 1 which had a fixed return and Market 2 which functioned as a commonpool resource with a return affected by the actions of all subjects in the experiment subjects received aggregated information so they did not know each individuals actions each subject i could invest a portion xi of hisher endowment in the common resource Market 2 and the remaining portion would then be invested in Market 1 the payoff function we used e ostrom Gardner and Walker 1994 110 was uix we if xi 0 1 uix we xi xiΣxiFΣxi if xi 0 2 the baseline experiment was a commons dilemma in which the game theoretic outcome involved substantial overuse of a resource while a much better outcome could be reached if subjects were to reduce their joint 424 allocation the prediction from noncooperative game theory was that subjects would invest according to the nash equilibrium 8 tokens each for a total of 64 tokens subjects could earn considerably more if they re duced their allocation to a total of 36 tokens in the commonpool resource subjects in baseline experiments with multiple decision rounds substantially overinvested they invested even more tokens than predicted so the joint outcome was worse than the predicted nash equilibrium6 Building off prior public goods research isaac and Walker 1988 we then conducted a series of facetoface communication experiments in which the same payoff function was retained after an initial ten rounds without communication subjects were told they could communicate with each other in a group setting before returning to their terminals to make their own private decisions this provided an opportunity for cheap talk the same outcome was predicted in these experiments as in the baseline since a subject could promise to cooperate but no external third party ensured that the promise was fulfilled subjects used facetoface communication to discuss strategies to gain the best outcomes and then to agree if possible on what each subject should invest they learned about their aggregate investments after each round but not the decision of individual subjects this gave them information as to whether the total investments were greater than agreed upon in many rounds subjects kept their promises to each other in other rounds some defections did occur subjects used information about the aggregate invest ment levels to scold their unknown fellow subjects if the total investment was higher than they had agreed upon the opportunity for repeated facetoface communication was extremely successful in increasing joint returns findings from communication experiments are consistent with a large number of studies of the impact of facetoface communication on the capacity of sub jects to solve a variety of social dilemma problems see e ostrom and Walker 1991 orbell van de kragt and dawes 1988 sally 1995 Balliet 2010 in many field settings resource users have devised a variety of formal or informal ways of sanctioning one another if rules are broken even though this behavior is not consistent with the theory of normfree complete rationality elster 1989 4041 it was thus important to see if subjects in a controlled experimental setting would actually use their own assets to financially punish other subjects after subjects played ten rounds of the baseline commonpool resource game they were told that in the subsequent rounds they would have an opportunity to pay a fee in order to impose a fine on another subject We found much more sanctioning occurred in this 6 in simple repeated public goods experiments subjects initially tended to contribute at a higher level than predicted by the nash equilibrium isaac et al 1984 1985 1994 isaac and Walker 1988 Marwell and ames 1979 and outcomes slowly approach the predicted nash equilibrium from a higher level in commonpool resource games on the other hand subjects initially achieved outcomes that were much worse than the nash equilibrium that they then slowly approached from below see also casari and Plott 2003 425 design than the zero level predicted7 subjects did increase gross benefits through their sanctioning but substantially reduced net returns due to the overuse of costly sanctions8 sanctioning was primarily directed at those who defected but a few sanctions appeared to be directed at low contributors as a form of revenge by those who had fined themselves in a further design subjects were given a chance to communicate and decide whether or not to adopt a sanctioning system of their own subjects who decided to adopt their own sanctioning system achieved the highest returns achieved in any of the commonpool resource laboratory experiments 90 percent of optimal after the fines related to the small number of defections were subtracted e ostrom Walker and Gardner 1992 the predictions of noncooperative game theory are roughly supported only when participants in a laboratory experiment do not know the reputation of the others involved in a commonpool resource dilemma and cannot communicate with them on the other hand when subjects communicate facetoface they frequently agree on joint strategies and keep to their agreements substantially increasing their net returns further communication to decide on and design a sanctioning system enables those choosing this option to achieve close to optimal returns B Studying CommonPool Resources in Field Experiments a series of field experiments have now been conducted by colleagues in colombia to assess whether experienced villagers who are dependent on resources make decisions about the time spent in a forest in a design that is mathematically consistent with those reported on above cardenas 2000 conducted field experiments in rural schoolhouses with over 200 users of local forests he modified the design of the commonpool resource experi ments without and with facetoface communication so that villagers were asked to make decisions regarding harvesting trees the outcomes of these experiments were broadly consistent with the findings obtained with university students in a different design cardenas stranlund and Willis 2000 ran ten rounds of baseline experiments with resource users from five villages who were then given a chance to communicate facetoface for the next set of experiments in five additional villages participants were told after the baseline rounds that a new regulation would go into force that mandated them to spend no more than the optimal time in the forest each round the prob ability of an inspection was 116 per round a low but realistic probability for monitoring rule conformance in rural areas in developing countries if the person was over the limit imposed a penalty was subtracted from that 7 see henrich et al 2006 in which field experiments were conducted in multiple countries testing whether a much broader set of participants would also use punishments in public goods experiments see also henrich et al 2004 for the reports of earlier field experiments of social dilemmas in fifteen small communities 8 similar findings exist for public goods experiments where punishers typically punish low contributors yamagishi 1986 fehr and Gächter 2002 426 persons payoff but the penalty was not revealed to the others subjects in this experimental condition increased their withdrawal levels when compared to the outcomes obtained when facetoface communication was allowed and no rule was imposed other scholars have also found that externally imposed regulation that would theoretically lead to higher joint returns crowded out voluntary behavior to cooperate see frey and oberholzerGee 1997 reeson and tisdell 2008 fehr and leibbrandt 2008 conducted an interesting set of public goods experiments with fishers who harvest from an openaccess inland lake in northeastern Brazil they found that a high percentage 87 percent of fishers contributed in the first period of the field experiment and that contri butions leveled off in the remaining periods fehr and leibbrandt examined the mesh size of the nets used by individual fishermen and found that those who contributed more in the public goods experiment used nets with bigger mesh sizes larger mesh sizes allow young fish to escape grow larger and reproduce at a higher level than if they are caught when they are still small in other words cooperation in the field experiment was consistent with observed cooperation related to a real cPr dilemma they conclude that the fact that our laboratory measure for otherregarding preferences predicts field behavior increases our confidence about the behavioral rel evance of otherregarding preferences gained from laboratory experiments ibid 17 in summary experiments on cPrs and public goods have shown that many predictions of the conventional theory of collective action do not hold More cooperation occurs than predicted cheap talk increases cooperation and subjects invest in sanctioning freeriders experiments also establish that motivational heterogeneity exists in harvesting or contribution decisions as well as decisions on sanctioning 6 stUdyinG coMMonPool resoUrce ProBleMs in the field having conducted extensive metaanalyses of case studies and experiments we also needed to undertake field studies where we could draw on the iad framework to design questions to obtain consistent information about key theoretically important variables across sites A Comparing Farmer and GovernmentManaged Irrigation Systems in Nepal an opportunity to visit nepal in 1988 led to the discovery of a large number of written studies of farmerbuilt and maintained irrigation systems as well as some governmentconstructed and managed systems Ganesh shivakoti Paul Benjamin and i were able to revise the cPr coding manual so as to include variables of specific relevance to understanding irrigation systems in a new coding manual for the nepal irrigation and institutions niis project We coded existing cases and again found numerous missing variables not discussed by the original author colleagues made several trips to nepal to visit previously described systems in written case studies to fill in missing data 427 and verify the data in the original study While in the field we were able to add new cases to the data set Benjamin et al 1994 in undertaking analysis of this large data set lam 1998 developed three performance measures that could be applied to all systems 1 the physical condition of irrigation systems 2 the quantity of water available to farmers at the tail end of a system at different seasons of the year and 3 the agricul tural productivity of the systems controlling for environmental differences among systems lam found that irrigation systems governed by the farmers themselves perform significantly better on all three performance measures on the farmergoverned systems farmers communicate with one another at annual meetings and informally on a regular basis develop their own agree ments establish the positions of monitors and sanction those who do not conform to their own rules consequently farmermanaged systems are likely to grow more rice distribute water more equitably and keep their systems in better repair than government systems While farmer systems do vary in performance few perform as poorly as government systems holding other relevant variables constant over time colleagues have visited and coded still further irrigation systems in nepal the earlier findings regarding the higher level of perfor mance of farmermanaged systems was again confirmed using the expanded database containing 229 irrigation systems Joshi et al 2000 shivakoti and ostrom 2002 our findings are not unique to nepal scholars have carefully documented effective farmerdesigned and operated systems in many coun tries including Japan aoki 2001 india Meinzendick 2007 Bardhan 2000 and sri lanka Uphoff 1991 B Studying Forests around the World in 1992 dr Marilyn hoskins who headed the forest trees and People Program at the food and agriculture organization fao of the United nations asked colleagues at the Workshop to draw on our experience in studying irrigation systems to develop methods for assessing the impact of diverse forest governance arrangements in multiple countries two years of intense development and review by ecologists and social scientists around the world led to the development of ten research protocols to obtain reliable in formation about users and forest governance as well as about the ecological conditions of sampled forests a longterm collaborative research network the international forestry resources and institutions ifri research program was established with centers now located in Bolivia colombia Guatemala india kenya Mexico nepal tanzania thailand Uganda and the United states with new centers being established in ethiopia and china see Gibson Mckean and ostrom 2000 Poteete and ostrom 2004 Wollenberg et al 2007 ifri is unique among efforts to study forests as it is the only interdisciplinary longterm monitoring and research program studying forests in multiple countries owned by governments private organizations and communities forests are a particularly important form of commonpool resource given 428 their role in climate changerelated emissions and carbon sequestration canadell and raupach 2008 the biodiversity they contain and their con tribution to rural livelihoods in developing countries a favorite policy rec ommendation for protecting forests and biodiversity is governmentowned protected areas terborgh 1999 in an effort to examine whether govern ment ownership of protected areas is a necessary condition for improving forest density hayes 2006 used ifri data to compare the rating of forest density on a fivepoint scale assigned to a forest by the forester or ecologist who had supervised the forest mensuration of trees shrubs and ground cover in a random sample of forest plots9 of the 163 forests included in the analysis 76 were governmentowned forests legally designated as protected forests and 87 were public private or communally owned forested lands used for a diversity of purposes no statistical difference existed between the forest density in officially designated protected areas versus other forested areas Gibson Williams and ostrom 2005 examined the monitoring behav ior of 178 forest user groups and found a strong correlation between the level of monitoring and a foresters assessment of forest density even when controlling for whether users were formally organized whether the users were heavily dependent on a forest and the level of social capital within a group chhatre and agrawal 2008 have now examined the changes in the condition of 152 forests under diverse governance arrangements as affected by the size of the forest collective action around forests related to improve ment activities size of the user group and the dependence of local users on a forest they found that forests with a higher probability of regeneration are likely to be small to medium in size with low levels of subsistence depen dence low commercial value high levels of local enforcement and strong collective action for improving the quality of the forest ibid 1327 in a second major analysis chhatre and agrawal 2009 focus on factors that affect tradeoffs and synergies between the level of carbon storage in forests and their contributions to livelihoods they find that larger forests are more effective in enhancing both carbon and livelihoods outcomes particularly when local communities also have high levels of rulemaking autonomy recent studies by coleman 2009 and coleman and steed 2009 also find that a major variable affecting forest conditions is the investment by local us ers in monitoring further when local users are given harvesting rights they are more likely to monitor illegal uses themselves other focused studies also stress the relationship between local monitoring and better forest conditions Ghate and nagendra 2005 e ostrom and nagendra 2006 Banana and Gombyassembajjwe 2000 Webb and shivakoti 2008 9 extensive forest mensuration is conducted at every ifri site at the same time that information is obtained about forest users their activities and organization and about governance arrangements comparing forest measures across ecological zones is misleading since the average diameter at breast height in a forest is strongly affected by precipitation soils elevation and other factors that vary dramatically across ecological zones thus we ask the forester or ecologist who has just supervised the collection of forest data to rate the forest on a fivepoint scale from very sparse to very abundant 429 the legal designation of a forest as a protected area is not by itself related to forest density detailed field studies of monitoring and enforcement as they are conducted on the ground however illustrate the challenge of achieving high levels of forest regrowth without active involvement of local forest users see Batistella robeson and Moran 2003 agrawal 2005 andersson Gibson and lehoucq 2006 tucker 2008 our research shows that forests under different property regimes government private communal some times meet enhanced social goals such as biodiversity protection carbon storage or improved livelihoods at other times these property regimes fail to provide such goals indeed when governments adopt topdown decentralization policies leaving local officials and users in the dark stable forests may become subject to deforestation Banana et al 2007 thus it is not the general type of forest governance that is crucial in explaining forest conditions rather it is how a particular governance arrangement fits the local ecology how specific rules are developed and adapted over time and whether users consider the system to be legitimate and equitable for a more detailed overview of the ifri research program see Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 chap 5 7 cUrrent theoretical develoPMents Given the half century of our own extensive empirical research and that of many distinguished scholars eg Baland and Platteau 2005 Berkes 2007 Berkes colding and folke 2003 clark 2006 Marshall 2008 schelling 1960 1978 1984 where are we now What have we learned We now know that the earlier theories of rational but helpless individuals who are trapped in social dilemmas are not supported by a large number of studies using diverse methods faysse 2005 Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 on the other hand we cannot be overly optimistic and presume that dilemmas will always be solved by those involved Many groups have struggled and failed dietz ostrom and stern 2003 further simple policy prescriptions to turn over resources to a government to privatize or more recently to decentralize may also fail Berkes 2007 Brock and carpenter 2007 Meinzendick 2007 We thus face the tough task of further developing our theories to help understand and predict when those involved in a commonpool resource dilemma will be able to selforganize and how various aspects of the broad context they face affect their strategies the shortterm success of their efforts and the longterm robustness of their initial achievements We need to develop a better theoretical understanding of human behavior as well as of the impact of the diverse contexts that humans face A Developing a More General Theory of the Individual as discussed earlier in section 3 efforts to explain phenomena in the social world are organized at three levels of generality frameworks such as the iad that have been used to organize diverse efforts to study commonpool resources are metatheoretical devices that help provide a general language 430 for describing relationships at multiple levels and scales theories are ef forts to build understanding by making core assumptions about specific working parts of frequently encountered phenomena and predicting general outcomes Models are very specific working examples of a theory and they are frequently confused with being theories themselves as alchian 1950 pointed out long ago what is called rational choice theory is not a broad theory of human behavior but rather a useful model to predict behavior in a particular situation a highly competitive market for private goods Predictions derived from the rational choice model are empirically supported in open markets for private goods and other competitive environ ments holt 2007 smith and Walker 1993 satz and ferejohn 1994 thus it is a useful model to retain for predicting outcomes in competitive settings related to excludable and divisible outcomes While it is not possible yet to point to a single theory of human behavior that has been successfully formulated and tested in a variety of settings scholars are currently positing and testing assumptions that are likely to be at the core of future developments smith 2003 2010 these relate to 1 the capability of boundedly rational individuals to learn fuller and more reliable information in repeated situations when reliable feedback is present 2 the use of heuristics in making daily decisions and 3 the preferences that individuals have related to benefits for self as well as norms and preferences related to benefits for others see Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 chap 9 e ostrom 1998 the assumption that individuals have complete information about all actions available to them the likely strategies that others will adopt and the probabilities of specific consequences that will result from their own choices must be rejected in any but the very simplest of repeated settings When boundedly rational individuals do interact over time it is reasonable to assume that they learn more accurate information about the actions they can take and the likely actions of other individuals selten 1990 simon 1955 1999 some highly complex commonpool resource environments however approach mathematical chaos J Wilson et al 1994 in which resource users cannot gain complete information about all likely combinations of future events in many situations individuals use rules of thumb heuristics that they have learned over time that work relatively well in a particular setting fishers end up fishing for knowledge J Wilson 1990 where using heuristics over time enables them to recognize diverse clues of environmental processes that they need to take into account when making their own decisions When individuals do interact repeatedly it is possible to learn heuristics that approach bestresponse strategies and achieve close to local optima Gigerenzer and selten 2001 in eras of rapid change or sudden shocks however heuristics may not enable individuals to achieve high payoffs individuals also learn norms internal valuations that are negative or positive related to specific actions such as lying or being brave in particular situations crawford and ostrom 2005 the strength of an internal commit 431 ment sen 1977 may be represented in the size of the internal weight that an individual assigns to actions and outcomes in a particular setting among individual norms are those related to valuing outcomes achieved by others cox and deck 2005 cox sadiraj and sadiraj 2008 andreoni 1989 Bolton and ockenfels 2000 fehr and schmidt 1999 propose that individuals dislike unequal outcomes of interactions and thus have an internal norm of inequity aversion axelrod 1986 posits that individuals who adopt meta norms related to whether others follow the norms that have evolved in a group increase the probability that norms will be followed leibbrandt Gneezy and list 2010 show that individuals who regularly work in teams are more likely to adopt norms and trust each other more than individuals working alone frohlich and oppenheimer 1992 posit that many individuals adopt norms of fairness and justice not all individuals have the same norms or perceptions of a situation ones and Putterman 2007 and they may differ substantially in whether they consider a way of sharing costs to be fair eckel and Grossman 1996 simply assuming that humans adopt norms however is not sufficient to predict behavior in a social dilemma especially in very large groups with no arrangements for communication even with strong preferences to follow norms observed behavior may vary by context because the perception of the right thing would change de oliveira croson and eckel 2009 19 various aspects of the context in which individuals interact affect how indi viduals learn about the situation they are in and about the others with whom they are interacting individual differences do make a difference but the context of interactions also affects behavior over time Walker and ostrom 2009 Biologists recognize that an organisms appearance and behavior are affected by the environment in which it develops for example some plants produce large thin leaves which enhance photosynthetic photon harvest in low light and narrow thicker leaves which conserve water in high light certain insects develop wings only if they live in crowded conditions and hence are likely to run out of adequate food in their current location such environmentally contingent development is so commonplace that it can be regarded as a universal property of living things Pfennig and ledónrettig 2009 268 social scientists also need to recognize that individual behavior is strongly affected by the context in which interactions take place rather than being simply a result of individual differences B The Central Role of Trust in Coping with Dilemmas even though arrow 1974 long ago pointed to the crucial role of trust among participants as the most efficient mechanism to enhance transactional outcomes collectiveaction theory has paid more attention to payoff functions than to how individuals build trust where others are recip 432 rocators of costly cooperative efforts empirical studies however confirm the important role of trust in overcoming social dilemmas rothstein 2005 as illustrated in figure 5 the updated theoretical assumptions of learning and normadopting individuals can be used as the foundation for understanding how individuals may gain increased levels of trust in others leading to more cooperation and higher benefits with feedback mechanisms that reinforce positive or negative learning it is not only that individuals adopt norms but also that the structure of the situation generates sufficient information about the likely behavior of others to be trustworthy reciprocators who will bear their share of the costs of overcoming a dilemma thus in some contexts one can move beyond the presumption that rational individuals are helpless in overcoming social dilemma situations Figure 5 Microsituational and broader contexts of social dilemmas affect levels of trust and cooperation source Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 227 Princeton University Press 2010 republished by permission of Princeton University Press C The Microsituational Level of Analysis asserting that context makes a difference in building or destroying trust and reciprocity is not a sufficient theoretical answer to how and why individuals sometimes solve and sometimes fail to solve dilemmas individuals interacting in a dilemma situation face two contexts 1 a microcontext related to the specific attributes of an action situation in which individuals are directly interacting and 2 the broader context of the socialecological system in which groups of individuals make decisions a major advantage of studies conducted in an experimental lab or in field experiments is that the researcher designs the microsetting in which the experiment is conducted thus empirical results are growing and are summarized in Poteete Janssen and ostrom 2010 to establish that the following attributes of microsituations affect the level of cooperation that participants achieve in social dilemma sett ings including both public goods and commonpool resource dilemmas 433 1 communication is feasible with the full set of participants When facetoface communication is possible participants use facial expressions physical actions and the way that words are expressed to judge the trustworthiness of the others involved 2 reputations of participants are known knowing the past history of other participants who may not be personally known prior to inter action increases the likelihood of cooperation 3 high marginal per capita return MPcr When MPcr is high each participant can know that their own contributions make a bigger difference than with low MPcr and that others are more likely to recognize this relationship 4 entry or exit capabilities if participants can exit a situation at low cost this gives them an opportunity not to be a sucker and others can recognize that cooperators may leave and enter other situations if their cooperation is not reciprocated 5 longer time horizon Participants can anticipate that more could be earned through cooperation over a long time period versus a short time 6 agreedupon sanctioning capabilities While external sanctions or imposed sanctioning systems may reduce cooperation when parti cipants themselves agree to a sanctioning system they frequently do not need to use sanctions at a high volume and net benefits can be improved substantially other microsituational variables are being tested in experiments around the world the central core of the findings is that when individuals face a social dilemma in a microsetting they are more likely to cooperate when situational variables increase the likelihood of gaining trust that others will reciprocate D The Broader Context in the Field individuals coping with commonpool resource dilemmas in the field are also affected by a broader set of contextual variables related to the attributes of the socialecological system ses in which they are interacting a group of scholars in europe and the Us are currently working on the further development of a framework that links the iad and its interactions and outcomes at a micro level with a broader set of variables observed in the field10 as illustrated in figure 6 one can think of individuals interacting in 10 scholars at the stockholm environment institute the international institute for applied systems analysis delft University of technology the University of Zurich the nordland research institute of Bodø University college the Potsdam institute for climate impact research Pik humboldt University Marburg University and the eU neWater project located at the University of osnabrück have had several meetings in europe to begin plans for using a common framework initially developed by e ostrom 2007 to study a variety of resource systems scholars at the Workshop in Bloomington and the center for the study of institutional diversity at arizona state University will also participate in this effort a core problem identified by these scholars is the lack of cumulation across studies on diverse natural resource systems as well as humanly engineered resources 434 an action situation generating interactions and outcomes that are affected by and affect a resource system resource Units Governance system and Users who affect and are affected by social economic and Political settings and related ecosystems see e ostrom 2007 2009 figure 6 provides an overview of the highest tier of variables that exist in all field settings the highest tier can be unpacked several times when one is trying to analyze specific questions related to sess in the field but there is not enough time or space to undertake a thorough unpacking in this article Figure 6 action situations embedded in broader socialecological systems source adapted from e ostrom 2007 15182 experimental researchers have reached a higher level of agreement about the impact of microsituational variables on the incentives levels of trust and be havior of individuals in dilemma situations than exists among field research ers few ses variables have a fully independent impact on the action situations that participants face and their likely behavior the ses variables that are most important differ depending on which interactions such as monitoring conflict lobbying selforganization or longerterm outcomes such as overharvesting regeneration of biodiversity resilience of an ecological system to human and natureinduced disturbances one wishes to predict a set of ten variables have been identified across many field studies as impacting the likelihood of users selforganizing in order to overcome a commonpool resource dilemma e ostrom 2009 Basurto and ostrom 2009 these in clude the size productivityand predictability of the resource system the extent of mobility of the resource units the existence of collectivechoice rules that the users may adopt authoritatively in order to change their own operational rules and four attributes of users the number the existence of leadershipentrepreneurship knowledge about the ses and the impor tance of the ses to the users linking the broader contextual variables and microcontextual variables is one of the major tasks facing scientists who work 435 across disciplinary lines to understand how both social and ecological factors affect human behavior11 8 coMPlexity and reforM the economic and social sciences have significantly moved ahead over the past five decades since scholars posited two optimal organizational forms two types of goods and one model of the individual extensive empirical research documents the diversity of settings in which individuals solve commonpool resource problems on their own when these solutions are sus tainable over long periods of time and how larger institutional arrangements enhance or detract from the capabilities of individuals at smaller scales to solve problems efficiently and sustainably see for example agrawal and Gibson 2001 Gibson et al 2005 schlager and Blomquist 2008 While there is not yet a single welldeveloped theory that explains all of the diverse out comes obtained in microsettings such as the experimental lab or broader contextual settings of fisheries irrigation systems forests lakes and other commonpool resources considerable agreement does exist nor do we have a single normative theory of justice that can unambiguously be applied to all settings sen 2009 Building trust in one another and developing institutional rules that are well matched to the ecological systems being used are of central importance for solving social dilemmas the surprising but repeated finding that users of resources that are in relatively good condition or even improving do invest in various ways of monitoring one another relates to the core problem of building trust Unfortunately policy analysts public officials and scholars who still apply simple mathematical models to the analysis of field settings have not yet absorbed the central lessons articulated here all too often a single policy prescription such as individual transferable Quotas itQs is recommended for all resources of a particular type such as all fisheries While several itQ systems are working successfully the time and effort needed to tailor the broad theoretical concept of an itQ system into an operational system in a particular location involves multiple years of hard work by the fishers involved as well as the government officials see clark 2006 yandle 2007 yandle and dewees 2003 eggertsson 1990 the most important lesson for public policy analysis derived from the intellectual journey i have outlined here is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rationalchoice theory designing institutions to force or nudge entirely selfinterested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the 11 see stewart 2009 for an important study that links size of group acceptance of norms of cooperation and support of property rights in twentyfive mining camps in the american southwest 436 development of institutions that bring out the best in humans We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness learning adapting trustworthiness levels of cooperation of participants and the achievement of more effective equitable and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales toonen 2010 to explain the world of interactions and outcomes occurring at multiple levels we also have to be willing to deal with complexity instead of rejecting it some mathematical models are very useful for explaining outcomes in particular settings We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes When the world we are trying to explain and improve however is not well described by a simple model we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it acknoWledGMents i wish to thank vincent ostrom and my many colleagues at the Workshop who have worked with me throughout the years to develop the research program that is briefly discussed herein i appreciate the helpful suggestions given me by arun agrawal andreas leibbrandt Mike McGinnis Jimmy Walker tom Wisdom and by the applied theory Working Group and the experimental reading Group and the excellent editing skills of Patty lezotte essential support received over the 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University of texas 439 53 dietz tom elinor ostrom and Paul stern 2003 the struggle to Govern the commons Science 3025652 19071912 54 dutta Prajit k 1990 Strategies and Games Theories and Practice cambridge Ma Mit Press 55 eckel catherine and Philip J Grossman 1996 the relative Price of fairness Gender difference in a Punishment Game Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 30 143158 56 eggertsson thráinn 1990 Economic Behavior and Institutions new york cambridge University Press 57 elster Jon 1989 Solomonic Judgements Studies in the Limitations of Rationality cambridge cambridge University Press 58 faysse nicolas 2005 coping with the tragedy of the commons Game structure and design of rules Journal of Economic Surveys 192 239267 59 fehr ernst and simon Gächter 2002 altruistic Punishment in humans Nature 415 137140 60 fehr ernst and andreas leibbrandt 2008 cooperativeness and impatience in the tragedy of the commons iZa discussion Paper no 3625 University of Zurich 61 fehr ernst 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york russell sage foundation 91124 174 Warren robert o 1966 Government of Metropolitan Regions A Reappraisal of Fractionated Political Organization davis University of california institute of Governmental affairs 175 Webb edward and Ganesh P shivakoti eds 2008 Decentralization Forests and Rural Communities Policy Outcomes in South and Southeast Asia new delhi sage india 176 Weissing franz and elinor ostrom 1993 irrigation institutions and the Games irrigators Play rule enforcement on Government and farmerManaged systems in fritz W scharpf ed Games in Hierarchies and Networks Analytical and Empirical Approaches to the Study of Governance Institutions frankfurt campus verlag Boulder co Westview Press 387428 177 Weschler louis f 1968 Water Resources Management The Orange County Experience california Government series no 14 davis University of california institute of Governmental affairs 178 Williamson oliver e 1975 Markets and Hierarchies Analysis and Antitrust Implications new york free Press 179 Williamson oliver e 1986 the economics of Governance framework and implications in r langlois ed Economics as a Process new york cambridge University Press 180 Wilson James a 1990 fishing for knowledge Land Economics 66 1229 181 Wilson James a James M acheson Mark Metcalfe and Peter kleban 1994 chaos complexity and community Management of fisheries Marine Policy 18 291305 182 Wilson Woodrow 1885 Congressional Government A Study in American Politics Boston houghton Mifflin 183 Wollenberg eva leticia Merino arun agrawal and elinor ostrom 2007 fourteen years of Monitoring communityManaged forests learning from ifris experience International Forestry Review 92 670684 184 yamagishi toshio 1986 the Provision of a sanctioning system as a Public Good Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 511 110116 185 yandle tracy 2007 Understanding the consequence of Property rights Mismatches a case study of new Zealands Marine resources Ecology and Society 122 httpwwwecologyandsocietyorgvol12iss2art27 186 yandle tracy and christopher dewees 2003 Privatizing the commons twelve years later fischers experiences with new Zealands MarketBased fisheries Management in nives dolšak and elinor ostrom eds The Commons in the New Millennium Challenges and Adaptations cambridge Ma Mit Press 101128 Portrait photo of Professor ostrom by photographer Ulla Montan